This is one in a series of Denver Post profiles on the candidates for mayor in Denver’s May 7 election.

Lisa Calderón’s house is classic Denver: painted red brick, intricate details on the wooden porch beams and yellow shingles beneath the peaked roof. For her, it is a symbol of everything that’s been lost in this city.

“When you grow up poor — both my parents were teenagers — you’re already born into debt,” she explained as she settled into her living room, which she has painted a luminous turquoise. “You never really catch up to accumulate wealth. But it was drilled into us: Whatever you do, buy a home.”

She bought into the Cole neighborhood in 2005, before its gentrification really accelerated, but she nearly lost the five-bedroom Victorian in the recession. Today she shares it with her adult daughter and two other women — a sign, she said, of just how hard it is for regular people to stay afloat in booming Denver.

“What I feel like I’m emblematic of is a lot of the struggle of the middle class,” she said.

Today, the home is a respite and a gathering place for her political campaign to upset the city’s power structure.

All five of the mayoral challengers have sharply criticized Mayor Michael Hancock, but it’s Calderón, 51, who has clashed most dramatically with him over the years, including in federal court. And while her campaign has the least money among the four major candidates, she has built a deep network of supporters through decades of community work.

The daughter of an African-American father and a Latina mother, she positions herself as the second wave of minority leadership in Denver. While Federico Peña and Wellington Webb led a revival of the city and put black and Latino people into city offices, Calderón says that she will bring a new mission: protecting communities from a system of power and development that she views as predatory.

“We’re not the wealthy people who are downtown in the shiny towers living,” she said. “We are in gentrifying neighborhoods where we are struggling to stay.”

Early life in “three worlds”

Calderón is a tea drinker and an avid cyclist who prefers bright colors. She greets acquaintances with hugs — but never hesitates to issue a scathing critique of the city’s power players. This is Calderón’s first run for office, but she has been a constant presence at city hall and neighborhood meetings for most of her life.

In her youth, life centered on her grandfather’s cinder-block house at 25th Avenue and Grove Street in northwest Denver, in the neighborhood they used to call the Northside. Her mother was one of 11 children, and she had Calderón at age 17.

Calderón traces a dedication to work and attainment through her lineage. Her maternal great-grandparents and grandparents were migrant farm workers, but her grandmother’s work as a mechanic in World War II later gave them a “sense of freedom,” with a career and a paycheck.

Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post

Mayoral candidate Lisa Calderón poses for a photograph in front of her daughter’s baby blanket, which hangs on the wall in the living room of her victorian home, on April 3, 2019, in Denver.

Calderón was born in 1968, a month before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, she notes. As a child of young, mixed-race parents, she fell into Denver’s race divides. “For a 17-year-old Mexican-American girl to have a little black baby — people would look at her, and look at me,” she said.

She describes a life among “three worlds” — her black family, her Latino family and her white Catholic school. A shy kid, she spent her time reading and trying to understand why people treated her differently. Her mother, meanwhile, introduced her to the Chicano movement that was focused in Denver at the time.

“I had my little 4-year-old fist in the air,” she told an audience at a campaign party, recalling a 1970s boycott of grapes led in part by Cesar Chavez.

Later, Calderón would herself attend college as a young, single mother, graduating from what was then called Metropolitan State College. Briefly a high school dropout, she now holds a master’s degree in liberal studies from the University of Denver, a law degree from CU Boulder and a doctorate in education from CU Denver. She teaches at Regis University.

Role in the city

Lisa Calderón has constantly challenged Denver’s political class.

At age 22, she was making headlines as she led protests for racial justice at Metropolitan State. Calderón, then the president of the Black Student Alliance, said she had been awakened two years earlier by the murder of a young student named Cameron Smith, a victim of misdirected gang violence.

“After that, I was really angry because I felt that his potential was taken away from him and I still had my potential,” the young Calderón told the Rocky Mountain News. By then, she already had been labeled a “radical and a militant” — descriptions that she rejected.

As an adult, she became a voice for criminal justice reform, especially in the area of domestic violence, which she had experienced. For years she was the legal and social policy director for SafeHouse in Boulder, a service provider for victims of domestic abuse.

Later, when killings by police officers rocked Denver, she convened the victims’ mothers for action. She has called for more black leaders and structural changes for law enforcement. And, in recent years, she was a prominent part of the coalition that coalesced against Hancock around the expansion of Interstate 70 — a symbol, to her, of the neglect of north Denver.

“We obviously lost that battle, but we ended up getting a $600,000 settlement with folks here in Globeville, Elyria-Swansea,” she said at a mayoral forum in Globeville. “In my administration, we will prioritize those neighborhoods, those communities that have been neglected by this administration and even past administrations.”

Over the years, Calderón has developed a split reputation: To her opponents, she can seem “pointed, or direct,” or even “formidable,” according to longtime friend and colleague Cathy Phelps. But to others, she is a community convener with endless empathy.

“She’s so exquisitely intelligent, and I think that sometimes that intimidates people, or they can’t get out of their own way, so they think that that’s all she is,” said Phelps, who works in the nonprofit arena.

Calderón believes that her criticism of the administration has driven Hancock to take vengeance.

In 2017, she and her team lost a city contract they’d held for nearly a decade. The Community Reentry Project received up to $650,000 a year to provide rehabilitation services for people leaving jail, according to city records. Calderón was paid up to $54,000 as director of the program.

The city sought new providers for the service, saying the contract was due for new competition. Calderón believes it was a coordinated effort — she only learned of the bidding process secondhand, she said. Her group applied and was a finalist, but lost out to a joint venture of Servicios de la Raza and Colorado Coalition for the Homeless.

The fight estranged her from a former ally: She earlier had led the Denver chapter of the Colorado Latino Forum with Rudy Gonzales, the executive director of Servicios.

Eventually, Calderón sued city officials in federal court, a case that’s still pending. Meanwhile, the new contractors report that they are serving far more clients than Calderon’s group did — an average of 50 cases per manager, compared with about six each under the old contract.

Calderón said her group worked more intensively with each client because the city wanted them to target the hardest cases, as opposed to a “volume” approach, she said. And the program “didn’t get the support we were really looking for” from jail staffers, according to Angela Hardin, a former staffer.

A change platform

On the campaign trail, the candidate describes herself as an answer to decades of male leadership that has tried “to build bigger and to grow faster.”

In one recent forum, she dinged Hancock for “mansplaining” and failing to call her Dr. Calderón.

She is forceful and detailed in describing her proposed reforms to city government. Her administration would be about “shared power,” she said, reeling in some of the extensive power of the mayor’s office in Denver.

Instead of personally filling many of the city’s appointed positions, she would create an “independent appointing agency,” removing agencies like the police department from the mayor’s influence.

She also has promised to close gender wage gaps, saying she is aware of numerous individual cases despite a 2017 study by the city that found “no gender pay inequity based upon job classification.” Calderón also promises to provide family leave for city employees, an option that city officials say they’re considering. And a Calderón administration, the candidate said, would better address accusations of sexual harassment that are going unheard.

That message, along with her years of service, has earned her a loyal following. She will need it: Her campaign has raised about $87,000, compared with Giellis’ $440,000 and Hancock’s $1.4 million in the last year. Calderón says that she will “do with people” what others do with money.

Meanwhile, the campaign has wrestled with staff turnover. Her campaign treasurer, Bernard Douthit, left early in the campaign. He said he quit because the campaign was spending too much money on its events while skimping on staff and Calderón disregarded his warnings.

“I was eager and very hopeful about the campaign and about her candidacy, because she’s got this great background, she’s a Denver native. But she did not demonstrate the leadership and managerial skills that I think are really necessary to be mayor,” said Douthit, a 2018 candidate for state treasurer and owner of a small business.

Douthit now holds an unpaid position on competitor Jamie Giellis’ steering committee. Three other former staffers declined to comment on their departures.

“What I learned is the people that you start with, who are often your friends, are not necessarily the seasoned campaign staff you need when you’re going into a campaign,” Calderón said. Douthit, she said, was fired for underperformance — a claim he denied.

Angela Hardin, who previously worked for Calderón at the Community Reentry Project, said the candidate was an effective leader. “She will stand up for folks and push and challenge when she feels that it’s needed,” she said. “I wouldn’t say that she has status quo in mind.”

RJ Sangosti, Denver Post file

Lisa Calderon speaks during a rally calling for Brett Kavanaugh to withdraw his nomination for the Supreme Court outside Senator Cory Gardner’s Denver office on Sept. 24, 2018, in Denver.

“Let’s change the rules”

In a classroom on the campus of Regis University, Lisa Calderón is talking about Denver. She is full-time faculty here, teaching sociology, criminal justice and urban planning.

On the overhead projector screen, there’s an image of a small, older home near blocky new development.

“It makes you wonder about this family,” she says of the older house. “Are they going to be able to stay there?”

She is thinking, perhaps, of her own family: Calderón’s family sold her grandparents’ house for $350,000 last year, following her grandfather’s death and 60-plus years of ownership. It’s now listed for $700,000 — a symbol, she said, of how real estate speculators drive up the cost of housing.

“What that tells me is, we can never go home,” she had explained in an earlier interview. Meanwhile, “middle-class professional gentrifiers” are taking over city boards and neighborhood groups across Denver.

Gentrification soon gives way to “corporate takeover,” and then the last stage brings the “globalization of our neighborhoods, and that is when you have people from outside of the United States buying up our neighborhoods,” she said.

The mayor has responded to the city’s anger with new affordable housing spending and a series of new initiatives. But city politicians too often “blame market forces” for displacement and gentrification, as Calderón tells her class. On the screen, there are quotes from Hancock and Councilman Albus Brooks.

Calderón has different ideas. She points first to Karl Marx’s theory of capitalism, which says that the system will exploit people to benefit the wealthy. Then she pulls up a slide with Robert Reich, the modern political commentator.

“When we look at Robert Reich’s theory, it’s not just about the market,” she tells the class.

“It’s about the rules of the market. And guess who makes the rules of the market? It’s government and private interest.”

The argument, she explains, is simple: “Let’s change the rules.”

This article previously included an incorrect address for Calderón’s grandfather’s house.

Andrew Kenney covers Denver and its government. He's interested in how power and development are shaping the city. He previously worked as a reporter for The (Raleigh) News & Observer and for Denverite. Email him at akenney@denverpost.com or call 303-954-1785.

More in Denver Politics

U.S. Senate candidate Dan Baer suspended his campaign Thursday and endorsed rival candidate John Hicknelooper. He's the third Democrat to drop out of the primary since Hickenlooper, the former governor, entered the race last month.

The resignation follows weeks of intense media scrutiny after a woman sued the sheriff's office because she was left to give birth alone in a jail cell and the city reached a $1.5 million settlement with multiple female jail deputies who alleged the sheriff's office did not protect them from sexual harassment from inmates.

Denver city officials are investigating after resident Jesse Parris said he was told Monday night that he could not wear a political button into the City and County Building, where the City Council was holding its weekly meeting, he said.